Early to Bed

by Cara Summers

  He moved toward her then and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "When you first called, I figured that's pretty much why you wanted to come here."

  "I don't understand...if you suspected that, why did you agree to see me?"

  He smiled. "Your voice. The first time I heard it I wanted to meet you."

  Frowning, she stepped back from him and gave her head a little shake to clear it. He had to be teasing with her, toying with her. "I can understand that you want revenge, and you have a perfect right to—"

  "I'm telling you the truth, Lily. I'm not a stupid man, and my father told me once never to trust McNeil Enterprises. I suspected from the start that you came here with an agenda that would force me to sell Henry's Place to your company. But I wanted to meet you. It was just that simple. Oh, I told myself that I had my own agenda. I even had Sam run a check on you, and I was impressed with what you'd done when you worked for the Marchmount chain in Italy and France. I don't have your kind of education and background, your insight into what changes I could make to turn Henry's Place around. I tried to tell myself that was why I invited you. But I think it was your voice."

  Oh, how she wanted to believe him. With every pore in her being she wanted the look in his eyes to be sincere. She wanted to trust that for some reason he didn't hate her. But...

  "You don't believe me," he murmured. Somehow his hand had moved to the back of her neck.

  She wanted to. More than that, she wanted to move toward him, feel his arms go around her, to lose herself in him. "This isn't right. I'm the cause of your problems. My birthday is March fifteenth. I—"

  His lips hovered just a breath from hers.

  "You shouldn't be doing this," she told him.

  "Probably not." He traced her bottom lip with his tongue. "But I heard your voice on March fifteenth when you called me, and I wanted you. I saw you sleeping on my couch and I wanted you. I want you

  right now." He nibbled kisses along her jawline. "I can't seem to help myself."

  "I was going to betray you," she said. Somehow it seemed essential that she make that point clear. But her arms had moved of their own accord, and she was already threading her fingers through his hair, drawing that clever mouth to hers,

  "You didn't," he said. "Why is that?"

  "Because I want you." I want you more than anything, she thought.

  "I want you, too," he murmured as he gathered her close and lifted her onto the bed.

  Much later, she awoke and found herself alone in the bed. Moonlight, so bright it made her blink, poured through the sliding glass doors that formed one wall of the bedroom. Tony had left her. Climbing out of the bed, she drew on her sweats quickly and moved into the living room of the suite. There was no sign of him there, either.

  Of course, he would leave her, she thought. She'd admitted that she wanted to betray him and his family. A man with strong loyalties like Tony Romano wouldn't risk betraying them. It wasn't until she stepped down into the sunken living room that she saw it.

  He'd set up a small table for two in front of the fireplace. As her gaze drifted over the silver candelabra, the small bunch of lily-of-the-valley in a crystal vase, a lump formed in her throat. Before she'd told him her real reasons for coming here, he'd said he'd had something to show her.

  Even as she blinked back a sting of tears, she moved

  toward the table and picked up one stem of the lilies and inhaled its scent. Romance. It moved her that he'd wanted to give it to her.

  The wave of regret struck her so solidly that she nearly took a step back. This was what she'd lost. For there wasn't a doubt in her mind that she'd lost Tony. Oh, he might give in to his desire for her. He was only human. But he wouldn't allow himself to feel anything more than that for her. He simply wouldn't be able to.

  She moved to a nearby table and picked up a picture next to the one she'd studied when Lucy had first shown her into the apartment. The Romano men. The one she hadn't met must be Nick. Because she couldn't help herself, she ran one finger down Tony's image. He looked younger then—they all did. Sam was skinnier. After setting it down, she picked up the other framed photo on the table. She hadn't paid much attention to it earlier. She recognized A.J. in this one—and the woman standing next to Nick had to be his wife, Tyler Sheridan, the granddaughter of the woman Henry Romano had built this very suite for—Isabelle Sheridan. She glanced around the room. It was altogether too bad that they were going to lose the place that had bound them together for so long.

  Then she had an idea, not quite sure what triggered it. Was it the name Sheridan? Was it the deep wave of longing that moved through her when she thought of the kind of family loyalty that the Romanos had always enjoyed? Or perhaps it was the fact that she'd moved toward the glass door that opened onto her patio and caught her reflection in the pane. The image of herself in the baggy sweats had stopped her in her tracks.

  She looked exactly as she had two years ago. Oh, she

  hadn't put on weight—at least not twenty-five pounds. It was the sweats that made her look heavier. But she was thinking like the old Lily also. She was slipping back into the old habit of not believing that she could have what she wanted.

  She wanted to put a stop to whoever was threatening Tony.

  She wanted to make sure that the Romano family could hold on to Henry's Place.

  And she wanted Tony Romano.

  A little voice in the back of her mind warned her that she was being greedy, that three goals were too much to hope for. Ignoring it, she headed for her cell phone because she had a pretty good idea how she could accomplish Goal 2. And if she was lucky, the other two might fall into her lap like dominos.

  Tony paced back and forth in his office. He hadn't been able to stay with Lily and not touch her again. She needed sleep and he needed to think. The small office he kept off the lobby was no larger than a monk's cell. It had been his father's office, too. If he stood, he could touch all the walls without moving. The first time he'd been able to do that, his father had smiled at him and told him he was a man. At times the small cubicle was the only place that allowed him the kind of isolation that was a very precious commodity in a hotel where family and guests demanded constant attention.

  In front of him on his desk lay a small stack of index cards. On each of them, he'd printed a detail or event that had occurred since J. R. McNeil had first contacted him. While he'd been printing them out, he hadn't allowed himself to think about them or try to make connections. Now, he was going to deal the cards out on his desk in different arrangements and see what occurred. He'd never had the talent for investigative work that his brothers and his cousin Nick shared, but he'd often tried to figure out solutions to problems in the hotel using just this process.

  From left to right he laid out the cards: McNeil Enterprises buys up block Henry's Place sits on; mechanical problems on the McNeil Enterprises jet; Lily's reservation canceled; Dame Vera predicts Tony Romano's luck is changing; Dame Vera predicts disaster—Ides of March is key; plumbing is sabotaged; Jerry Langford McNeil arrives, believing that Lily is still in Tahiti and he's taking over for her; Giles Fortescue arrives, motives multiple and questionable, claims he wants Henry's Place because of old rivalry; man in a blue car shoots at Tony or Lily or both of them; the blue sedan with the same shooter at the wheel tries to run them down.

  Tony paused then and frowned as he recalled another blue car—the one he'd almost been hit by on his way home from that poker game with his brothers. What if that hadn't been an isolated incident? Quickly, he scribbled it on an index card and placed it next to the others. He'd take time later to brainstorm about how it might be related to the other facts. Right now he needed to get all the stuff out on the table.

  He pondered the old rivalry between McNeil and Fortescue and his father's warning to never trust McNeil. After a moment of staring at the cards that now covered most of the surface of his desk, he grabbed another one and wrote: Lily returns to McNeil

  Enterprises, de
termined to get father's long-denied approval and earn a vice presidency.

  Tony frowned down at the letters he'd just printed. Did someone want to make sure that Lily didn't get the vice presidency? That would explain a lot of the facts detailed on the index cards. Drawing another out of the stack, he printed: Tony kisses Lily in the lobby of the hotel, letting everyone know that she most likely has an inside track to getting Henry's Place for McNeil.

  But how did the attack on the plumbing fit in? And the attempted hit-and-run on him after the poker game at Sam's? Unless those were just unrelated incidents. Folding his hands behind his head, Tony let his mind sift through the possibilities, but he'd always had trouble with coincidences. With a sigh, he gathered up the cards, shuffled them and dealt them out on the desk again.

  An hour later, he wasn't any closer to a definitive theory about who might be behind the attacks. But he was almost certain that the threat against Lily was real—a lot more real than his brothers believed. There was someone he needed to talk to about that. After consulting his Rolodex, he picked up his phone and dialed a number.

  Lily frowned down at the papers she'd lined up in neat rows on the bed. Each one contained one part of the plan she'd come up with to save Henry's Place for the Romanos. It wasn't right yet, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out what was missing. From the time she'd been a little girl, it had helped her to write everything down and spread it out in columns or rows. She often suspected she'd picked up the habit when

  she'd spent long hours watching one of her nannies play solitaire. The experience had certainly given her a distaste of card games, but the neatness of the rows of papers, or perhaps the visual picture of her overall plan, usually stimulated her thought processes. The loans were the tricky part—better if they didn't come all from one place. She lifted that sheet and swapped it with the one marked "first-year expenditures." After studying the new configuration of problems and solutions, she was more convinced than ever that something was missing. Oh, she had enough to present at the meeting she'd arranged. But she'd have felt better if she had the whole solution.

  When her cell phone rang, she welcomed the interruption. "Yes?"

  "If you want to survive another twenty-four hours, leave Henry's Place right now."

  "Who is this?" she asked. The voice had sounded tinny and mechanical. When there was no answer, she repeated the question. This time all that greeted her was a burst of static.

  For a moment after she shut off her phone, Lily merely stared at it. For the first time, her anger outweighed her fear. If they thought they could scare her off, they had another think coming.

  When her cell phone rang again, Lily pressed the button that would power it off. They were not going to frighten her.

  It was only when the phone rang again that she realized it was the one on the table next to the bed.

  She reached for it, then said, "Hello."

  "I'll be picking you up in ten minutes," A.J. said. "Tyler's plane just left Boston. They'll be touching down on the runway at JFK in about thirty minutes. You've got your disguise?"

  Lily glanced at the foot of the bed. "All I have to do is put it on." Lucy had provided her with a navy blazer, Grace with reading glasses and Alistair had sent up a fake mustache. Gina had come up with jeans and a man's hat. The latter had earned her speculative glances from her daughters. Hopefully, disguised as a man, Lily would be able to slip out of the hotel with no one the wiser.

  "Are you ready for the meeting?" A.J. asked. Lily glanced down at her columns of notes. "As ready as I'm going to get. How about you?" The plan she'd come up with required AJ.'s help. Tyler's too.

  "All set. But there's a slight change in plans. Sam's coming with us."

  Lily could hear what she thought was his voice, but she couldn't catch the words.

  "He wouldn't let me come unless I agreed. But I really think he's afraid Tony will kill him if he lets you out of that hotel without his personal bodyguard services. But he agrees with me that the best place to have a family meeting that Tony can't interrupt is on Tyler's plane. Sam and I will be there shortly at the kitchen exit."

  Lily glanced at her notes one last time, but there was no last-minute epiphany in her mind. She was going to have to go with what she had.

  "When I asked to borrow a costume, I didn't expect it to be a dress." Tony stared with more than a little dismay at his image in the mirror. "Relax," Alistair said. "You only have to wear it until we get you safely into the limousine. Vera and I will have you back to your old self in plenty of time for your meeting with Mr. McNeil."

  Vera tugged the wig into place on his head. "Perfect."

  "I look like Miss Marple on a bad hair day," Tony said.

  "Every day was a bad hair day for Jane Marple," Dame Vera said. "That's one of the reasons I always declined that role. The other was the appalling wardrobe. Jane Marple wasn't known for her fashion sense, either. There." She gave the wig a final pat. "You're good to go, as they say nowadays. All set, Alistair?"

  "Always, my dear." After rising from his chair, he moved toward her and extended his arm.

  "Just a minute." Vera reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, plucked one out and inserted it into a long silver holder. Then she placed her hand on Alistair's arm.

  "I sincerely hope you are not going to smoke that, my dear."

  "Don't be silly. It's merely a prop. If Myrna Loy were alive, she'd be eating her heart out right now. I hope that the bar is stocked in the limousine."

  "You must have more faith in me than that, my dear. I ordered Leroy to chill the vodka and vermouth when I called to order the car brought round."

  "Well, I guess that's almost as good as champagne."

  "Shall we go?"

  Tony followed in their wake as they swept out of the suite. All he'd wanted from his two favorite guests was a costume so that he could safely get by whatever men Drew and Sam had stationed outside the hotel. By the time they'd gotten him into the dress, Alistair and Vera had expanded his plan to include them and their limousine.

  "You need a dresser to get you in and out of your costume," Alistair had explained.

  "And you'll be safer this way," Dame Vera had assured him. "The limo is bulletproof. Alistair took care of that right after all those nasty political assassinations in the sixties."

  Tony could only hope that the vehicle still ran. He had less than thirty minutes to get to the Plaza for the meeting he'd set up with J.R. and Pamela McNeil.

  Tyler Sheridan Romano was was one of the most beautiful women Lily had ever seen. The blond hair and blue eyes, the classic features were just a part of it. Tyler had an inner glow that Lily suspected came from the family that surrounded her in the small office on her private jet. Nick Romano sat a short ways away with a sleeping baby tucked under one arm and a two-year-old boy with Tyler's blue eyes and his father's dark hair sitting beside him. At AJ.'s request, they'd detoured to JFK on their way to a business meeting in Atlanta.

  A.J. stood, leaning over Tyler's shoulder, looking at the notes Lily had brought. Sam sat close by. He'd urged his wife to take a seat, but she'd claimed that the baby kicked less if she stood up. Lily found herself envying the closeness, the intimacy that seemed to flow so visibly between each couple.

  "This is a marvelous plan," Tyler said, looking up from the papers to meet Lily's eyes. "I've been trying to convince Tony to let me pay for some of the renovations, but he wouldn't hear of it." She turned toward her husband and Sam. "The way Lily has structured it, we wouldn't be loaning Tony the money. Instead/each family member would be investing in the future of Henry's Place. In return, we'll each receive a certain number of ownership shares. Tony remains in charge—like any good CEO—but he'll have the money to make all the renovations that are needed."

  "He may just go for it," Nick said. "His father asked him to keep the place afloat. It's been a matter of pride for him to keep that promise. But family is important to Tony. He's going to want to make sure
that the hotel survives."

  "And look at this," A.J. said, pointing to something on the paper in Tyler's hand. "Lily's proposing that we set up our investment in the hotel so that our profits go into a trust for our children and future Romanos. Tony can't accuse us of wanting to throw our money into a black hole with this clause as part of the package." "He's always been so stubborn," Sam said. "We're Romanos now. That means we're family," A.J. said, meeting her husband's eyes. Tyler glanced over at Nick. "Yes, we are." "You won't get any argument from me," Nick said. "Me either," Sam said. "It's Tony we have to worry about."

  Tyler looked back at Lily. "Once I explain this plan to him, he can't possibly think we'd be making a donation to a lost cause. Even with the improvements and renovations Lily has mapped out, the hotel should be turning a healthy profit in two years." "I knew I liked her," A.J. said.

  "I just have one question," Tyler said. "Why are you doing this?"

  "Because I don't want Tony—I don't want any of you—to lose Henry's Place. I've only been there a couple of days, but I can see that it's more than a hotel to all of you. It's a home. It's where you gather to nurture each other, to draw strength from each other." She glanced at Sam. "I saw that today when you all came to the penthouse suite after the shooting."

  "Okay. Then there's only one suggestion I have," Tyler said. "All the Romano women ought to be of- fered an opportunity to invest. For Grace and Lucy, it can be later when they have the money. But Gina should be invited now."

  For the first time since she'd entered the small plane, Lily smiled. "Of course. I knew there was something missing, but I just couldn't put my finger on it."

  "And you should invest too," Tyler said. "From what Sam and A.J. tell me, you'll be a Romano woman soon enough."